A man has to be Joe McCarthy to be called ruthless. All a woman has to do is put you on hold.

As much success came to him, my father stayed true to his promise. He built the hospital to help the most helpless children with catastrophic illnesses.

Fame lost its appeal for me when I went into a public restroom and an autograph seeker handed me a pen and paper under the stall door.

I don’t think homosexuality is a choice. Society forces you to think it’s a choice, but in fact, it’s in one’s nature. The choice is whether one expresses one’s nature truthfully or spends the rest of one’s life lying about it.

I find that balancing my life with my work with the kids at St. Jude, working on books, working on my career as an actor and taking time out for my husband and family help to cushion a lot of the blows.

I realize now that I was a feminist and the minute I heard the word I certainly knew it meant me, but at that time I don’t think we had the label yet. But there’s no doubt about it that I was born a feminist.

I think loss of loved ones is the hardest blow in life.

In my work, there’s a tremendous amount of rejection and waves of fertile and fallow times.

In that I found being able to talk to my family about my feelings, praying for strength and realizing that our lives have a deep purpose and the journey of our lives is to find out what that is and express it, was the only way I could have gotten through it.

In the 1960s we were fighting to be recognized as equals in the marketplace, in marriage, in education and on the playing field. It was a very exciting, rebellious time.

It’s because it was at a time when women didn’t have any power. It was so unusual for a young woman in her 20s to have power that I seized the power but tried not to flaunt it.

It’s fascinating for us women to begin looking at our lives in five-year plans. It really does help you keep on track. If that’s too hard, start with a two-year plan.

Living with these teenage boys allowed me to see how much their psyches were like their girl counterparts. They were more familiar to me than I would have thought.

Losing my parents was probably the hardest and deepest blow from which I’ve had to recover.

My father said there were two kinds of people in the world: givers and takers. The takers may eat better, but the givers sleep better.

Never face facts; if you do you’ll never get up in the morning.

Nothing is either all masculine or all feminine except having sex.

One of the things about equality is not just that you be treated equally to a man, but that you treat yourself equally to the way you treat a man.

So I still seized the power, but I felt that if I officially made myself the boss, in black and white, it would be too intimidating for the other producers and the other men who worked on the show. In other words, I had the power, but I gave them the title.

The Golden Girls certainly proved that there was a large audience for a show about older women.

Today, all patients accepted for treatment at St. Jude’s are treated without regard for the family’s ability to pay. Everything beyond what is covered by insurance is taken care of, and for those without insurance, all of the medical costs are absorbed by the hospital.

We are a research center and treatment facility all under one roof.

We’ve been taught to believe that actions speak louder than words. But I think words speak pretty loud all of our lives; we carry these words in our head.

What the results are telling them is that the most money is spent in volume by young people. They also see young people as the consumers of tomorrow and are trying to capture their attention from their competitors.